For much of the 20th century the majority of the scientific community has denied the possibility of a universal flood. Yet more evidence is accumulating that there indeed was a worldwide flood several thousand years ago.

One of the most fascinating scientific discoveries in recent times regarding a universal flood came from some scientists who were not searching for any evidence of the Flood. It came from oceanographers in the Gulf of Mexico who were doing some rather routine research on coral and sediments of the ocean floor.

Their two oceanographic vessels had pulled from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico several long, slender core samples of the sediment, which includes the fossil shells of one-celled plankton called foraminifera. While still alive, these organisms lock into their shells a chemical record of the temperature and salinity of the water. When they reproduce, the shells fall away and drop to the bottom. A cross-section of that ocean bed carries a record of climates that the oceanographers say go back more than 100 million years.

The cores were analyzed in two different investigations—by Cesar Emiliani of the University of Miami, and by James Kennett of the University of Rhode Island and Nicholas Shack of Cambridge University. Both analyses pointed to a dramatic drop in the salinity of the water, providing compelling evidence of a vast flood of fresh water into the Gulf of Mexico thousands of years ago.

Cesar Emiliani explains the results: "A huge amount of ice-melt water rushed into the Gulf of Mexico and produced a sea-level rise that spread around the world with the speed of a tidal wave." He adds, "We know this because the oxygen isotope ratios of the foraminifera shells show a marked temporary decrease in the salinity of the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. It clearly shows that there was a major period of flooding from 12,000 to 10,000 years ago, with a peak about 11,600 years ago. There is no question that there was a flood and there is also no question that it was a universal flood" ("Noah, the Flood, the Facts," Reader's Digest, U.S. edition, September 1977, p. 133).

It is also worth mentioning that the radiocarbon dating used to establish the number of years is imprecise after 4,000 years, so the time of this universal deluge could be closer to the 4,300 years described in the Bible as the time of the biblical Flood.

Another recent discovery that could have a relation to the inundation of the Gulf of Mexico is the finding by geologists William Ryan and Walter Pitman of the sudden flooding of the Black Sea basin around 6,000 to 7,000 years ago (according to their dating). "The salt water," says Smithsonian magazine, "poured through the deepening channel, creating a waterfall 200 times the volume of Niagara Falls. In a single day enough water came through the channel to cover Manhattan to a depth two times the height of the [former] World Trade Center, and the roar of the cascading water would have been audible at least 100 miles away" ("Evidence for a Flood," April 2000, electronic version).

An additional evidence of the Deluge being global and not local is the literally thousands of flood stories from around the world. One enterprising historian, Dr. Aaron Smith of the University of Greensboro, North Carolina, became obsessed with classifying all the flood accounts. "As a result of years of labor, he has collected a complete history of the literature on Noah's Ark. There are 80,000 works in seventy-two languages about the Flood, of which 70,000 mention the legendary wreckage of the Ark" (Werner Keller, The Bible as History, 1980, p. 38).

It is hard to believe that if the Flood were only a local event, there would be 80,000 different accounts of it from around the world that describe it as universal in scope. GN